A road trip in an electric vehicle doesn't have to be nerve-wracking anymore

Snacks, check. Playlist, check. Fully charged car — check?

Electric vehicles are central to automakers’ future. They’re key to climate advocates’ hopes. But most Americans remain leery of taking them on long road trips.

And I get it. As NPR’s cars and energy correspondent, I’ve been on EV road trips where overcrowded and broken roadside chargers caused hassles and headaches. I’ve heard from EV enthusiasts who shrug off road trip angst, and from non-EV owners who say it’s a top reason they won’t go electric. And I’ve heard from auto executives and government officials who say improving the country’s charging infrastructure is a top priority.

So, is road trip charging getting any better?

Earlier this summer, photographer Amanda Andrade-Rhoades and I drove more than 1,000 miles, partly to try to answer that very question. What we found was a charging infrastructure at a point of flux. Cars are changing. Chargers are changing.

And things are getting better. Just not evenly.

Starting point: Washington, D.C.

Andrade-Rhoades and I met up at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., where we got into a borrowed 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 Limited with a fully charged battery. We plugged in a destination near Boston, agreed on our road trip playlist — that would be the highly bingeable podcast Normal Gossip — and hit the road, following the instructions from the car’s built-in navigation software.

We drove, riveted by the tales of other people’s drama, up the busy I-95 corridor.

I want to pause here to note: We spend way more time commuting than on long drives, and EVs handle daily driving with ease. Also, many households have multiple cars, so they might own an EV and never use it for road trips. And yet, Americans do love road trips— so addressing range anxiety matters.

We passed through Baltimore, Wilmington and Philadelphia, with a stop for lunch at Panera and a bit of sightseeing in New Jersey. Who could resist the allure of the world’s second-largest light bulb?

Road Stop 1: The Thomas Edison Memorial Tower at Menlo Park in New Jersey

The Ioniq’s built-in navigation software could identify when we needed to charge and what our options were. After 228 miles it recommended we stop. I vetoed its first suggestion for a charger — the station only had a single plug, which meant if someone beat us to it we could have a long wait.

So instead, we headed to the parking lot of a ShopRite — not quite as scenic as a giant light bulb, but hey, I wasn’t about to complain about a working charger where we needed one.

Charge Stop 1: Bloomfield, N.J., 21 minutes

At the ShopRite’s EVgo station, we plugged the car (which we had named Serenity) into a charger (which EVgo had named Horatio).

Horatio opened less than two years ago. That's true for more than half of the non-Tesla fast chargers in the U.S., according to NPR's analysis of data from the Department of Energy. That's one sign of just how new America's fast-charging infrastructure is.

But "fast" is relative and varies by car. Next to us, MD Koyes Khan pulled up in his Toyota bZ4X. Fast-charging his EV from 20% to 80% takes “like, one hour … sometimes one and a half hours, depends on the weather,” he said.

And as an Uber and Lyft driver, he’s not making money while he waits to charge.

“It’s not good for us,” he says.

Different cars and different chargers have different maximum charge rates. Horatio, our charger, could charge at up to a blistering 350 kW. And the Ioniq 6 is a speedy-charging car; in certain configurations, it's the No. 1 fastest-charging EV on the market according to Edmunds and MotorTrend. (It’s a combination of a battery designed to handle the stress of a superfast charge, and an efficient car that gets more miles from a smaller battery.)

The result? We were back on the road in a hair over 20 minutes. That's longer than a gas stop, but way shorter than an hour. And just a few years ago, that kind of speed was mostly hypothetical.

Road Stop 2: A dairy store in Norwalk, Conn.

When we had left D.C., the Ioniq 6 routed us toward Boston along a path that only required one charging stop. But as we got closer, the car said we’d need another one. Maybe it was our road stop detours (in addition to the light bulb, we’d stopped at “The World’s Largest Dairy Store” to get some ice cream and greet some goats). Maybe it was running the AC. Whatever the reason, it was clear we’d need a tad more juice.

Fortunately, there were plenty of options. We pulled into the back corner of a mall parking lot.

Charge Stop 2: Westfield Trumbull, Conn., 10 minutes

Are you getting the sense that an EV road trip is a tour of parking lots? That’s mostly true; while some companies are getting better about locating stations near amenities, many chargers have been plopped wherever there’s ample parking and easy access to electricity.

At this Electrify America station, we weren’t charging quite as quickly as at the EVgo, but we only needed a small top-up anyway. During our short stop, Beth Shapiro and her son Isaac Prusky pulled up in her Polestar 2.

She’s taken the car on several road trips and praised the experience. “People are so nice at these charging stations,” she said.

In fact, she only had one real complaint about driving an EV. “Sometimes I feel like I'm doing a good thing for the world, but then I worry because batteries are a problem,” she said. What exactly does she worry about? “Where this battery's going to go when it has no more useful life," she said, "and what it’s going to do to the universe.”

I told her we were on our way to a battery recycling company near Boston for a story about exactly that. We got back in the Ioniq to continue north.

Overnight charge: Residence Inn, Marlborough, Mass.

In our first day, we had traveled 436 miles over the course of 10 hours and charged for a total of half an hour. If I were traveling just for fun, I’d have sought out charging stops where we could also grab food for maximum efficiency — but since I was reporting, I wanted to use that time to talk to people.

But when it came to hotels, I planned this trip very much like I would a personal road trip, looking for hotels in our price range and along our route that offered chargers. Our Residence Inn had four plugs on the ChargePoint network, and while we slept, the Ioniq went from a 30% state of charge back to fully juiced up.

The next morning, we visited the EV battery recycling facility Ascend Elements in Westborough, Mass. (Read all about it.) Then we hopped back on the road to return home.

Charge Stop 3: Pompton Lakes, N.J., 22 minutes

Our Day 2 drive required just one stop. We pulled into an Electrify America at the parking lot of a strip mall in this suburb of New York.

In the same parking lot was a Tesla Supercharger — with space for three times as many cars.

Tesla, love it or hate it, has been a transformative company in multiple ways. The Supercharger network was a very expensive bet that investing heavily in road trip chargers was key to getting car buyers to embrace EVs. And it worked. Road-tripping in a Tesla is better than in other EVs. The Supercharger network is the biggest and most reliable EV charger network in the country, without any serious rival.

I walked over to the Superchargers, where I chatted with driver Deepti Bhat. Turns out she’s no Tesla superfan. She had a long list of complaints about her car — the interior gets too hot, some parts get jammed — but none whatsoever about charging.

“Wherever I’ve stayed I’ve found charging nearby,” she says.

For many years only Tesla drivers could use those Superchargers. Now, in a major shift, other companies are embracing Tesla’s charging technology; in exchange, Tesla is gradually opening its network up to other users. Ford and Rivian got access first.

Other brands are still waiting, including Hyundai. So we were stuck at the Electrify America charging station. We got lucky — there was no wait. Jorge Nuñez, who charges at that station regularly, said he sometimes has to wait an hour for a slot.

I asked if he ever looked longingly over at all the empty Superchargers. “I do get jealous a little bit,” he said.

As Serenity charged, I chatted with local resident Agatha Hatzoglu, who pulled in next to Nuñez in her Volkswagen ID.4. She said she’s happy with the chargers in her corner of Jersey, but she prefers a gas car for trips to the Jersey Shore, where the chargers are fewer and farther between.

“I'm sure in the future it's going to be a lot better,” she says, “but I'm too old to wait for the future.”

She’s 76, and she looks great. I ask her for some skincare tips. Her advice? A plant-based diet. Oh, well.

A gap in the network near Allentown, Pa.

From Pompton Lakes we head south. But this time, instead of following the I-95 corridor and its abundant chargers, we turn slightly farther inland.

It’s probably common knowledge by this point that some parts of the country have a lot more chargers than others. California? Oodles. Wyoming? Oof.

The Northeast has lots of chargers, but it’s not just region by region that varies; within just a short drive, the charger map can look very different. That's why Hatzoglu liked driving an EV in some parts of New Jersey but not others. And that’s why coming south on I-78, barely an hour west of where we’d traveled the day before, we hit a stretch of interstate in central Pennsylvania where the closest charger was 50 miles away.

We had plenty of juice to make it through that stretch of highway without sweating it. But if we had unexpectedly needed a charge, it would have been a lot harder than it was in Connecticut.

“And not a single sign on the side of the road to indicate, ‘This is your last chance!’ ” Andrade-Rhoades pointed out. (In general, EV chargers and lack thereof aren’t advertised on highway signs — drivers need to watch apps or their car’s navigation system to know where to exit.)

Road Stop 3: The Hershey's Chocolate World factory tour, Hershey, Pa.

In 2021, the federal government allocated billions of dollars for public EV chargers to plug gaps like these. And there are chargers planned, funded by that money, on that exact stretch of I-78.

But they’re not there yet. Pennsylvania is actually moving unusually fast to spend this money, with a few federally funded chargers already open and many others in the design phase. But unusually fast is still taking years. In most states, not a single federally-funded charger has opened.

Colton Brown, PennDOT’s EV guy, says there’s a lot of legwork that goes into opening these stations — from finding locations to striking deals with utilities — and the process is new for states. Charging stations aren’t a traditional infrastructure project.

“Departments of Transportation, they're used to roads and bridges,” he points out. “It's a very different space to be in.”

After an overnight at the Best Western Plus in Hershey — where there was only a single charger, but fortunately it was all ours — we squeezed in one more road trip stop: the Hershey's Chocolate World factory tour.

I dropped Andrade-Rhoades off in D.C. and headed toward my home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Charge Stop 4: Haymarket, Va., 6 minutes

We didn’t drain the battery much on our last — and shortest — day of driving. So the last charging stop took only six minutes. I added about 75 miles of range, enough to make it home to the Shenandoah Valley with battery to spare.

All told, we drove more than 1,000 miles. It took 2 ½ days. And charging? That took just under an hour, total. 

No question, you could refuel at gas stations much more quickly. On the other hand? That's significantly less time than we spent on food and bathroom breaks.

And, notably, every charger we visited worked.

Your mileage may vary, of course. “Roughly 1 in 5 visits to a public charger ends in a failed charge event,” says Brent Gruber, who studies EVs for auto data company J.D. Power. That includes chargers that aren’t working, or have vandalized cords, or are so crowded that a driver gives up.

Gruber says we got lucky. But, he says, it wasn’t just luck.

“We are seeing signs of improvement across the board,” he says. “Speed, increased availability … the ease of charging is getting much better.”

My takeaway? The ease of road trip charging still depends on what you're driving, where you're driving, and how carefully you plan.

There’s still a long way to go before public charging infrastructure meets the needs of today’s EVs, let alone projections for the future. But the journey is underway.

Copyright 2024, NPR

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